The Reason I Am an Artist
by Deplaisance de la Nuit
Summary: Linda, now living in Los Angeles, has found her artistic talents settled into the uneasy niche left by the policies of the Hoope administration, and she believes that the past month has been a positive turn for the better. The good news is that it has. The bad news is her own contribution.


**Why I am an Artist**

There is not much to recommend the social climate under Kira, but there is this: no artist with any interest in realism need look far for employment.

The newest Madam Public Defender (though "Madam" overstates it; this one looks barely older than I am) gestures between the composite and my sketch of the suspect's apprehension. "Sketch Artist Iota, how would you account for the discrepancy in the facial shape?"

So far as I can tell, she's fresh out of law school at best, and my bone-tough reputation is as new to her as basic counterarguments. I fight back the world-weary sigh a bit more easily than usual before I explain. "The composite is derived only from witnesses' descriptions. You'll note that the chief difference is in the set of the cheekbones. Unless those are very high or wide-set, witnesses will invariably fail to register them."

"And can you vouch that this was indeed the expression on his face at the time of apprehension?" The DA has taken care to point out that expression: a face of dullest guilt, the face you'd have found a few years ago on a slum boy sliding by slowest inches toward the chewing gum. By no stretch of the imagination does that qualify as evidence, but this wet-eared representative appears to have decided to fight on the prosecution's terms.

"Certainly, ma'am," I say, finding a bit of frost creeping into my voice. "On-scene sketch artists are not, as popularly believed, mere auxiliaries to the defense. Neither, I assure you, do we skew our portraiture toward the prosecution. We are in the business of presenting the truth – and," I add, with a pointed glance at her client, "of allowing the legal process to proceed to completion in the first place."

That is, perhaps, an overcharitable assessment of Sketch Artist Sigma, the long-braided, frowsy old bag who is filling in to sketch as I testify. (They say she was the one assigned to that explosion out in the desert, too, and that rankles more. It's the usual logic: no harm in a subpar sketch artist drawing the dead; might even be politic if she does it badly enough. Mind, from all I've heard, I doubt I'd be able to make head or tail of what happened there either, but Sigma isn't liable even to try.) Her mission statement probably _is_ exoneration at all costs. I wonder whether she'll let a bit of unflattering anger creep into the portrayal of my face, or portray me frantically pinwheeling my charcoal pencil between my fingers. Ordinarily, cross-examinations do bring out that nervous habit in me – in accordance with Wammy's tradition, I decided within the first semester to put on an irritating personal quirk, and wish it were as easily taken off – but it has been much easier to refrain this past month. I am breathing too freely to need it.

Events are unfreezing.

So it is with a greater serenity that I endure the usual wearings of a court day, those gradual abrasions which have gone on so long as, on some days, to be barely perceptible.

I notice, on adjournment, that the flag at the front entrance remains at half-mast. I have often thought the United States vaguely absurd for all its flag ritual, but for once, it is perfectly excusable. If there's anything I wonder at, it's that forty-three successive American presidents have _refrained_ from taking their own lives. Particularly from the second Roosevelt onward, the weight of the office seems all but impossible for one man to carry.

Generally, those I've seen discuss the Hoope matter view it differently. The phrase "suspicious circumstances" is thrown hither and thither, never with any spoken notion of what those circumstances might be, and the way I've seen them say it, with a hush in their voice and a hunted look in their eyes that I have never known among even the most ambitious of political conspiracy theorists, suggests that "assassination" is only a second-cousin to the name they have in mind for the President's death.

Not impossible, I suppose. No inquest in the world would have greater pressure to conceal the cause of death; if it were remotely an option to pretend it hadn't happened to begin with, the White House would do that, too. But it's pure, rank superstition that drives the muttering. So far as I can tell, Americans have always seen death not as inevitable, but as a thing that pops out with a hockey mask and chainsaw if you don't watch yourself. All that's new here is they're now trying to get their mouths around a proper noun for it.

At any rate, for all these dark, half-spoken speculations, none of the muttering seems to be dancing around Vice President Sairas. Nor should it. I don't think a man with less desire for a position of authority ever won an election, even as running mate. Going on three weeks after being sworn into office, he has yet to announce any policy whatsoever. If he is so daft as to renounce Hoope's flagship agenda on anonymity, that might change my mind, but until then I will call a bullet in the brain a bullet in the brain.

In the parking lot, Madam Public Defender goes to her car, takes out a gym bag, and walks straight back into the courthouse, bound no doubt for the on-site rec center. It makes roughly as much sense as a man hoping to survive the Terror by making sure that his hair is always flowing past his neck, but not in three years have I met a public defender who isn't keen on aerobics. Even if it's a relatively rational eye for their reputation, they had better have another career in their sights, and soon. I certainly do. Whatever happens, my position is precarious.

But I hum to myself as I wait for the bus home. Legal sketch art is a good public service, and a lucrative one, but it was never my intended pastime. And events are unfreezing.

My spirits are still high two hours later, when I unlock the door to my flat. (Locks are frowned upon in the Los Angeles area, which makes all the more reason to use them and irritate all interested parties.) It is without so much as a preliminary piece of toast that I turn to my latest, _The Coronation of Alfred._ He cuts an anxious and unkingly figure; the funeral of Ethelred dominates the scene. I am not entirely happy about using such an idiot as Ethelred in this manner, but that's the idiom I have boxed myself into, and I paint in good cheer knowing that there is none better left available.

I begin with calligraphic strokes, inscribing the verse on the scroll I painted yesterday over the corner.

 _There was not English armour left,_

 _Nor any English thing,_

 _When Alfred went to Athelney_

 _To be an English king._

The painting is probably not historically accurate. As to the poem I've excerpted, Chesterton outright states it is not meant to be historical. I have never given a fig. My eye transcribes reality to my hand, and my mind's eye will take many years' decay before it does worse, but I am an artist on account of the things that set my imagination to fly. While the rest of the entrance class made a sport of picking apart the mechanics in _The Sign of Four_ , I was too busy admiring the nobility of Watson's love for Mary, and things proceeded in kind from there. That is where my true genius lies, and I make no apologies.

Chesterton probably did not intend the name "Athelney" to bear a double meaning, either.

That December, when we were still reeling from the echoes of November's fireworks, I determined to myself that there were four possible Japanese scenarios.

Case Torch: the NPA are worthy of the task in their own right. Plainly out of the question by now.

Case Waxwork: the Japanese government has put up a dummy front to suppress panic, taking only the most obvious actions needed to assuage the public. But who, with the public eye as the sole priority, would contact an institution like mine?

The worst, but, in my view, most probable, was Case Argus, where the survivors are already exposed to Kira, name and face and movements, and any meaningful action would mean their deaths. They might well, in that case, be made to inquire as they did. But I heard no sign of coercion in the Japanese man on the phone – no hesitancy, nor strain, nor even poor word choice, though his accent was just thick enough that he might plausibly make a significant slip on the edges of the language barrier.

That leaves only Case Alfred. The flight to Athelney – surname Jones – in the face of the superior foe.

And they wanted – I can think of no other alternative – non-sensitive identity verification in order to form a tripartite alliance: Near, Mello, and the NPA. I had thought even a two-sided alliance between the parties I knew was out of the question.

Truly, they did me more good than I did them.

I am lovingly embellishing the tall, blond youth tucked among the Saxon peasantry when I hear my phone begin to blast out the 1812 Overture.

"Good evening," I say, with the ambiguously professional tones of the woman whose home is her office; a side effect of my security package is that all numbers come up as unavailable. "What may I do for you?"

"Linda. Haven't got in touch for a while."

Near.

His voice is instantly recognizable; hasn't deepened a note in five years of adolescence. I barely keep myself from laughing at that, but it's a happy laugh, a laugh arising mostly because it it is so good to hear his voice.

He's apparently decided to pass this off as an ordinary conversation. I can tell he's miraculously picked up the art of small talk; he still has that habit of over-enunciating significant remarks he wishes to come across as casual. Perhaps he doubts my phone security; perhaps it's merely the old schoolyard game. Either way, it's a challenge not to be refused.

"Is this – is this Niall?" I say, a typical young woman blown away by the sudden appearance of an old school-friend. "Wow, you don't say it's been a while! Where on earth have you been? What've you been up to?"

"Well, the move west's been postponed. Hopefully not for long. The past few years have been wild."

He is not yet in Japan, then, but hopes to be. There's probably something in the last comment worth parsing, too. _He_ hasn't got wildness enough in him to take part in a pyjama party (or, conversely, put on outdoor clothing). And the past few years, so far from being wild, have been a relentless process of penning and domestication. But, stumped, I can only plough on.

"Ah. Shame about the move. Well, the art business is still chugging along. I think people are getting scared to stand out even to the extent of buying an original painting, but regardless it's going. At the moment I'm doing a painting of Alfred the Great – you know, around the time he had to fall back on Athelney – and I'm very pleased with it. Oh, and I lately did a commission _for_ Alfred, speaking of. You know, _our_ Alfred, out west. Looked half like you, actually."

A lengthy pause. "Did it."

That flatness in his voice has never yet boded well. "Hum, you don't seem happy. Should it have looked more like you? Or not like you at all?"

"You did this commission for Jonathan, did you say?"

There is no Jonathan of our mutual acquaintance, any more than there is an Alfred. "No, that was Alfred. But Jonathan, Jonathan, I feel like I should remember him, let me think..."

And then the bottom drops out of my stomach.

"Did you say, ah, the past few years..."

"Wild times. Maybe this isn't the best moment to go into details."

Condescension drips heavily from the last sentence. I have no desire to lash back.

There is not one of us – however fanciful, however relentlessly practical – who would fail to remember the history of Jonathan Wild. Jonathan Wild, the Crown's appointed thief-taker- and the master of nigh every thief in London.

The NPA lies under a scenario I never looked low enough to consider. Case Wild: absolute usurpation.

Now, thanks to me, in possession of two invaluable portraits.

"No." There is no point in trying to sound any less rocked than I am. "No, not the right moment at all. He was putting on this accent when he asked, Alfred was, I mean, like English wasn't even a fluent... Is- oh, damn, is there anything at all I can do for you, N-Niall?"

"This commission was a diptych?"

"Yes," I say woefully.

"Hmm, wouldn't be my first choice. We were talking about that blond boy who slept in room eight just last month. The thirteenth. Let's just say he hasn't improved since we left school. But you'd think he'd take up a portrait all by himself, wouldn't you?"

"When I got the commission, that was the fifteenth. For the diptych. Odd choice. Considering. Yeah. Then-" My voice breaks with desperation. "Then you're _sure_ "wild" is a word that's actually in your vocabulary these days?"

"Oh, about seven percent sure. Five, maybe, before I called."

I laugh bitterly at the old school joke. There's no doubt in his mind.

"I guess you've already done enough, then, Linda." The contempt in his voice would freeze a bird in flight. "Might as well look up the whole school directory while I'm at it."

"Stay safe," I whisper, but he has already hung up.

I slam down the phone and send a whirling kick toward the center counter, willfully stubbing my toe. "Fine!" I scream, loud enough that I can imagine Near hears me. "You're right! I'm wrong! But why-" (I violently set to chopping the onions, which is at this point the supreme exercise in redundancy-) "do you need to be such an arrogant- little- _twerp_ about it!"

I know perfectly well why. Because a Wammy's valedictorian is entitled to it. Wish they _would_ be gentlemen about it – specially with each other, now that I've betrayed them both – but the plain truth is that smarts net you the right to be rude. Me? None too smart. Downright stupid, really. That's why I'm only an artist, why I'm spending my weeks sitting about in a courtroom whose whole reason for being sinking faster than Venice while I sell next to nothing in a city that's sinking almost as fast, why the best I've been able to do over the past six years is sketch the looks of a few dozen LA residents of dubious virtue just before they get a black dome shoved over their heads.

I am intellectually relieved to finish my dinner without anyone knocking on my door to inquire about the disturbance. In my mind's eye, I build a red red bonfire five feet high on the apartment roof and watch _The Coronation of Alfred_ dissolve into so many blackened curls and ashy bits of wood.

In reality, I just tear it in two, letting the paint smear over King Alfred where it's still fresh, and stuff it in the garbage compactor. Fire-code violations are on the death list now.

In the morning, President Sairas, bearing the expression of a squeezed toad, does not say he will rescind Hoope's anonymity protocol. That would be superfluous. He squeaks out that there is no possible means of fighting Kira on which he will not fold completely. The well-dressed, dull-eyed mass of passengers makes no comment on the matter, but bombards me with the usual deafening silence on the way to the courthouse. I can hear my own thoughts, and by that dint can imagine I stand apart. But through their eyes I am just as well-dressed, as expressionless and as silent, excepting only the pen I whirl incessantly between my fingers.

I have a gallery to fill on the theme of cowards and fools. Not a major gallery; they still won't admit anything representational into those mausoleums, and even if they did, I would need to be sufficiently cowardly that it came across as sham dissent, not the real, dangerous-

No. That's no dissent, and it's not a pair of wings to fly on, either. It's nothing more than self-hatred. You might not be able to atone for what you've done, but you never could, Linda; that's why God – the real one – offers absolution. Remember the enemy. The usurper, there's your theme. Cowards and fools can figure in as secondary elements as long as you keep the center.

I may have sore cause to regret it today, but like it or not, an artist is what I am. I certainly have good cause to believe my worst days are behind me; now that even the President has surrendered, it'd certainly do no favors for me to crumple at the podium in turn. All I can do from here on out is make the most of what I'm given.

Let those in the thick of the fight do the same. Events really are unfreezing, even if there is nothing I can do to better them.


End file.
